What the Betting on 'Blogs' Holds for Newspapers
From today's Post:
By Leslie Walker
Sunday, April 14, 2002; Page H07
What will be the more authoritative Internet news source in five years, one of the most established newspapers in America or a ragtag collection of news diaries called Web logs?
That's the subject of a $2,000 wager (www.longbets.org) between Martin Nisenholtz, chief executive of New York Times Digital, and Dave Winer, creator of a Web publishing tool called Userland Radio. It reflects a growing debate among writers at offline and online media over how the Internet will reshape journalism.
Web logs – "blogs," for short – are a diary-like publishing format increasing in popularity thanks to tools making it easy to create and update them. A blog is stuffed with brief commentary and links to other Web writings and news, with updates often coming several times a day. Blogs are as varied as the people creating them, covering topics from the Arab-Israeli conflict to their creators' love lives to town-gown relations in College Park.
Winer bet that by 2007, a Google search on five keywords representing the year's top news stories would rank Web logs higher than the New York Times site.
"I think it's a sucker bet," Winer said in a phone interview. "There are half a million Web logs now, and in five years there'll be a lot more."
But in accepting the bet, Nisenholtz wrote, "Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate and coherent. News organizations like the Times can provide that far more consistently than private parties can."
Winer considers Web logging a new form of journalism and estimates 10,000 high-quality blogs exist. His own (www.scripting.com) links to numerous examples; the Web site of another blog-software developer, Blogger (www.blogger.com), offers another set of links.
But the format has drawn ridicule from ink-stained scribes, most recently Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, who trashed blogs as a place "where no thought goes unpublished."
Financial Times columnist Louise Kehoe once penned a similarly derisive article. But she had a change of heart and announced she would start blogging herself next week at FT.com in a journal called – what else? – the Blog.
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